Reality Slips Further Away from the GOP

Greg Sargent describes the corner the GOP has painted itself into. They find themselves having to appeal to two very different groups of traditional Republican voters — white collar suburbanites and blue collar rural and exurban voters. And the message that works for one turns off the other.

Trump and Republicans have distilled down Trumpism’s core narratives into a series of ludicrous and menacing cartoons for the GOP base’s consumption. Why? Brownstein’s analysis provides an answer: Because the bulwark against truly large GOP losses in the House is made up of many districts that are competitive but are also heavily populated with blue-collar, rural, small-town, exurban and evangelical whites. Hold off Democrats in all those districts, and if they win the majority, it will be a limited one.

And so, to galvanize those voters, Trump has directed bread-and-circuses belligerence at euro-weenie elites and China. He has employed endless lies and hate-mongering to hype the migrant “caravan” into a national emergency, and will send in troops as props to dramatize the point. Republicans are running ads absurdly depicting immigrants as criminals and invaders alongside many other ones that indulge in naked race-baiting. Trump is vowing an end to birthright citizenship, confirming the ethno-nationalist underpinnings of Trumpism and further fanning the xenophobic flames.

Polls tell us that Republicans appear to be losing big time in white collar suburbs, which includes the famous soccer mom vote, even though the economy is, by some measures, not that bad, or at least hasn’t crashed from Trump’s policies, yet. Why is that?

One likely answer is that the story Trump has told about the economy — and the country — just isn’t resonating in many of these districts. That narrative is that immigration and globalization pose major threats to the well-being of Americans, and Trump is now acting on those threats, via stepped-up deportations from the interior, efforts to slash legal immigration and refugee flows, and trade wars. That, plus his tax cut, has created the supposed “Trump boom,” in stark contrast with the economy under Barack Obama, which is uniformly depicted as a pre-Trumpian hellscape.

But people who live in white-collar suburbs probably noticed that the economy under Barack Obama wasn’t a pre-Trumpian hellscape. Further, upper income people are more likely to be directly dependent on the global economy and are less likely to feel personally threatened by immigration than, apparently, people who live in more isolated rural areas.

So in appeals to surburan voters, Republicans soften the rhetoric quite a bit.

 While Republicans employ garish race-baiting to galvanize the hard-core white GOP base, this ad’s soft-focus messaging directed at white suburban women features none of that imagery. The spot’s iconic white suburban woman is obviously conflicted over her vote — we aren’t told why, but we know full well why — but finally checks the “Republican” box out of concern over her child’s economic future.

But even that “soft” ad is based on the fiction that Democrats are bad for the economy, which is a claim that anyone old enough to remember the 1990s ought to at least question.

Republicans are also running ads vowing to protect people with preexisting conditions, yet they have also locked themselves into opposition to Obamacare, which Democrats are now campaigning on protecting. As Ezra Klein explains, this has left Republicans with no alternative but to lie relentlessly to obscure the real GOP health-care agenda, which is to deregulate insurance markets and regressively strip protections and economic assistance from millions. This, too, is deeply unpopular.

Trump and Republicans are closing by lying about health care and taxes to limit losses among suburban and well-educated white voters, and lying about immigration while race-baiting against individual Democratic candidates to keep the downscale white GOP base energized. This probably won’t be enough for Republicans to keep the House. But whatever is to be on this front, the need to lie so relentlessly about all these matters itself constitutes an admission of failure. The public has seen Trump’s fusion of ethno-nationalism and orthodox GOP plutocracy put into governing practice, and is rejecting it.

But there’s a bigger problem for Republicans, as revealed in research into senior staffers in Congress. It turns out that folks in Washington have no idea what laws their constituents actually want them to enact. This was true of both parties, but much more so for Republicans than for Democrats.

Across the five issues, Democratic staff members tended to be more accurate than Republicans. Democrats guessed about 13 points closer to the truth on average than Republicans.

And this is a problem because …

Whether the Democrats or the Republicans seize control of Congress after the midterms, you can be sure of one thing: They will have very little idea what laws the public actually wants them to act on.

The current Republican-controlled Congress is a good example. Its signature accomplishment is a tax-cut bill that hardly anyone likes or asked for and that is estimated to add about $2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.

Only about 30 percent of Americans supported it — unlike the well over 70 percent of Americans who consistently support raising the minimum wage, background checks for gun sales and taking action on the climate crisis. Bills were actually proposed on these issues, but you would hardly know it; they were barely considered, and it goes without saying that none passed.

So, there is a huge opportunity for Democrats if they take back the House. They can start passing laws that reflect what people in their districts actually want, and then if Republicans block them they can go to their constitutents and blame the GOP. But if they continue their tactics of the past — negotiating with themselves, attempting bipartisan cooperation — Republicans will take the House back again in 2020.

One More Week

Today we woke up to the news that Trump thinks he can ignore the 14th Amendment and end birthright citizenship by executive order. He also plans to appoint his favorite golf cart to the Senate.

Okay, I made up the part about the golf cart. But I wouldn’t put it past him.

Greg Sargent writes,

To oversimplify, the idea that this can be undone by executive order turns on a rather creative interpretation of an 1890s Supreme Court decision. That decision interpreted the 14th Amendment — which holds that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens” — to apply to, well, all persons born in the U.S. The restrictionists claim this does not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants, because they aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

The argument is absurd — undocumented immigrants are indeed subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and denying their children citizenship privileges would be unconstitutional. But Trump could theoretically direct federal agencies via executive order to stop treating the children of non-citizens as citizens. This would be challenged, and the Supreme Court would then “clarify” whether birthright citizenship applies to the children of the undocumented. (With this court, you never know.)

I understand the “jurisdiction” part to refer to the children of diplomats. Diplomats are not subject to U.S. laws and therefore are not under U.S. jurisdiction, so a child born to the diplomatic of a foreign country in the U.S. is not automatically granted citizenship. Unless Trump proposes extending diplomatic immunity to undocumented immigrants, I don’t see how his argument holds water. This is something I’ve written about before; see The Constitutional Anchor Baby Crisis and The Constitutional Anchor Baby Crisis, Revisited.

And then there’s Mike Pence.

Vice President Mike Pence was roundly criticized on Monday for appearing at a campaign rally in Michigan at which a “Messianic rabbi” invoked Jesus in mourning the deaths of 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Messianic Judaism, which believes that Jesus is the messiah and considers the New Testament to be authentic, is not recognized as Jewish by any mainstream Jewish movement in the United States, or by the Chief Rabbinate, the supreme spiritual authority for Judaism in Israel.

Also,

Two days after the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, Vice President Pence bowed his head at a rally on Monday in Michigan as a religious leader who casts himself as a “rabbi” offered a prayer for the victims in Pittsburgh.

But the man who shared a stage with Pence, Loren Jacobs, preaches Messianic Judaism, a tradition central to Jews for Jesus, a group condemned by Jewish leaders as faux Judaism that seeks to promote Christian evangelism. The major Jewish denominations join the state of Israel in viewing followers of Messianic Judaism as Christian, not Jewish.

His appearance drew outrage on social media. Jason A. Miller, a Detroit-area rabbi, wrote on Facebook that more than 60 rabbis appeared in a directory of the Michigan Board of Rabbis — “and yet the only rabbi they could find to offer a prayer for the 11 Jewish victims in Pittsburgh at the Mike Pence Rally was a local Jew for Jesus rabbi?”

I take it Republicans weren’t counting on the Jewish vote in the midterms.

Meanwhile, the list of people who will not meet with Trump in Pittsburgh today seems to be growing. The list includes the family of at least one of the victims and Tree of Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, according to Politico.

Are We Disgusted Enough Yet?

The Creature is going to go to Pittsburgh tomorrow and pretend that he cares. I won’t be watching. Be sure to read the letter to Trump from Pittsburgh Jewish leaders.  Newsweek reports that Ivanka and Mr. Ivanka had to persuade Trump to explicitly denounce anti-Semitism.

Does anyone want to bet that he can get through a speech about the massacre at the synagogue without saying something nasty about somebody? Or bragging about himself? Or claiming that people are mean to him, too?

Paul Waldman:

 In the age of Trump, the politics of conservative victimhood has reached new heights. And as usual, it comes right from the top.

After bombs were sent to a dozen people President Trump had attacked, he quickly identified the person really being threatened. “Come to think of it, who gets attacked more than me?” he asked at a White House political event just after reading some words about unity that were obviously written by others and about which he couldn’t have cared less.

Dana Milbank:

Eleven Jews are dead in Pittsburgh, gunned down during Shabbat services allegedly by a man who shared President Trump’s paranoia about a migrant caravan. Pipe bombs were sent to more than a dozen of Trump’s favorite political targets, including the homes of two former presidents, Democratic leaders and CNN.

But let us not lose sight of the real victim here: Donald Trump.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders hadn’t given a briefing in nearly a month, so she had a lot of time to build up grievances before Monday afternoon’s session. She emerged half an hour late with a scowl, and read a written statement containing the requisite denunciations of the attack in Pittsburgh and affirmations of Trump’s affection for Jews.

But when the questioning got going, it became clear that she was rather less animated by the pipe bombs and the synagogue massacre than by perceived attacks on Trump by the media.

“The very first thing the media did was blame the president and make him responsible for these ridiculous acts,” she began. “That is outrageous.”

Whenever I write about Sarah Sanders I am tempted to include the image of the Mouth of Sauron from The Return of the King. 

Haaretz is reporting that Netanyahu’s deplomats are carrying water for Trump:

Unfortunately, their message of sympathy is being undermined by the shameful effort of Israel’s top diplomats in the U.S. to absolve Donald Trump of any responsibility for fomenting an atmosphere of right-wing hate and, even more outrageously, to implicate anti-Semitism on the left instead.

For many American Jews, Trump’s cardinal sin is the false equivalence he created between neo-Nazis and leftist demonstrators in the wake of the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which Heather Heyer was killed.

There are “fine people” on both sides, Trump said, infuriating Americans in general and American Jews in particular. This did not deter Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer and New York Consul General Dani Dayan, however, from using the same odious analogy.

Rather than focus on the neo-Nazi credentials of Pittsburgh perpetrator Robert Bowers or on Florida’s serial pipe-bomber Cesar Sayoc’s endless admiration for Trump, Dermer and Dayan opted to muddy the waters. The two senior diplomats emulated the U.S. president by obfuscating the clear-cut white supremacist backdrop of the Pittsburgh atrocity and, in Dermer’s case, by commending Trump’s statement after the attack.

So Israeli officials are siding with Nazis?

In other news: Politico reports that Trump doesn’t do any work.  And former President Jimmy Carter sent a letter to Republican nominee for governor, Brian Kemp, asking him to resign as Georgia secretary of state.

What’s Happening Now, Golden Parachute Edition

(The shooter in Pittsburgh, according to early and possibly unreliable reporting, is so far right that he turned against Trump after Charlottesville because he thought Trump didn’t speak up to defend the neo-Nazis against antifa. It’s said the guy was obsessed with the “caravan is coming” propaganda on Fox News, and he blamed Jews and George Soros for the caravan. Again, though, this isn’t corroborated and might be wrong.)

Megyn Kelly is now officially bounced from NBC. We might reflect on how stupid it was to hire her in the first place. Erik Wemple writes,

Kelly left Fox News for NBC News with a considerable incentive in the form of a $69 million contract over three years. That would be nearly $900,000 per bi-weekly paycheck, before taxes, insurance and whatnot.

There are many problems with this pay level. One is connection: How is a person from the top 0.01 percentsupposed to promulgate coverage that’s in touch with the needs of the poor or even the middle class? When she was hired to her NBC News spot, Kelly was supposed to participate in political coverage now and then. Was she supposed to speak about the anger of the economically displaced with a straight face?

Next is priorities: How many top-tier investigative journalists could NBC News pay with $23 million a year? At $200,000 per year, it could afford 115 such journalists. With such a crew, perhaps the network wouldn’t have needed any investigation into a fumbled Weinstein story.

Of course, network news is all about ratings and advertising revenue, not news reporting, which is one reason Donald Trump is president now. According to Wemple, the fellow who hired Kelly was Andy Lack. Lack also has a history of protecting employees accused of sexual harassment, such as Matt Lauer, and he caught the blame for NBC’s killing Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein, which Farrow then took elsewhere.

Lack claimed he was hiring Kelly because she was such a great journalist, which she isn’t. She’s a bobblehead. Lack possibly believed that Kelly’s audience from Fox News would follow her to NBC, but they didn’t. Wemple wrote a couple of days ago,

Fox News is the “plug-in” network, as this blog has often called it. The genius of Ailes and Rupert Murdoch was to create a programming conceit targeting an entire population of Americans, a conceit that spread across the network’s lineup. Loyalty goes more to the brand, the channel, than to this-or-that anchor. That’s why Kelly didn’t bring her audience with her to NBC News.

It’s also the case that she was a bad fit for NBC. Wemple continued,

While Kelly did indeed conduct many excellent interviews at Fox News, she also — as has been widely noted again in the aftermath of her blackface comments — turned in racially offensive work, including the well-publicized comments about Jesus and Santa (they’re white, kids!), the hyping of voter-intimidation charges against members of the New Black Panther Party and other moments. With the support of her colleagues and Ailes, Kelly had no trouble weathering the outcries that followed these moments.

On the other hand: Had any of those instances occurred under the roof of NBC News, the backlash would have resembled what we’ve witnessed this week. Colleagues would have rage-tweeted; management would have scrambled; apologies would have streamed from the organization. Maybe NBC News executives determined that those Fox News scandals were aberrations, that Kelly wouldn’t pack those sensibilities with her when she moved into her office at NBC News. Whatever the case, they made a mistake. “I didn’t focus on what the Fox sensibility is versus what the NBC News sensibility is,” Lack said after Kelly’s hiring. “I did want to know that I thought she would fit into the NBC culture.”

She clearly did not.

As I have ranted here in the past, most of the people who end up being Masters of the Universe didn’t get there by being exceptionally smart or talented. They got there by being aggressive, by shrewd networking, by being at the right place at the right time. Andy Lack screwed up, big time, by hiring her. Will NBC do anything about that?

Helaine Olen writes at WaPo,

The news of Kelly’s rather extraordinary payday, for what can charitably be deemed a subpar performance, comes the same week the New York Times discovered that Andy Rubin, a high-level executive at Google and the creator of the Android operating system, received a staggering $90 million exit package when he was shown the door in 2014 following credible allegations of sexual misconduct.

The Android operating system is a big deal, but is it a $90 million golden parachute big deal? How is it that one can rise to a position in which one is rewarded by truckloads of money even when one screws up?

There are, it’s fair to say, a lot of things that are eating away at American society at the moment. But one thing that doesn’t get the attention it deserves is how the wealthy and powerful get chance after chance and, even when they fail, get to exit on a generously padded slide — while the rest of us, on the other hand, too often live precarious lives, one lost job away from financial disaster.

Well, yeah. When the Megyn Kellys and Andy Rubins soak up vast sums of money for being a mediocre hack and overentitled technoweenie, respectively, that’s money not being used to expand the company or compensate the cube farm workers who actually keep the place going.

We see this time and time again in American life. CEOs exit with absurdly generous golden parachutes no matter how dreadful their performance, while the employees they downsize or fire receive scraps. Sometimes the situations are all but absurd. At Wells Fargo, former CEO John Stumpf retired with more than $100 million in retirement benefits, apparently a reward for pushing sales goals so intense, the only way many employees could meet them was by opening fake accounts for unwitting customers.

The whistleblowers who attempted to report the scam over the years, on the other hand, were frequently shown the door. In at least one case, Wells Fargo initially refused to hire one former employee back even after ordered to do so by the Department of Labor, and only reached a confidential settlement with the woman in the face of sustained media attention.

And people wonder why the young folks are taking an interest in socialism.

The situation carries over into other areas. In 2008, the banks famously got bailed out, while millions of Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. A 2016 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Center for Effective Government found that even as Fortune 500 companies froze pension plans for the vast majority of their workforce, they did no such thing for the men and women in charge, who continued to be offered access to defined benefit packages for retirement.

Then there is Donald Trump, who has skated from bankruptcy to bankruptcy even as he’s stiffed everyone from creditors to small contractors. One reason for this rather stunning track record? Many of those who lent him money decided they would lose less on the deal if they kept him in business. He was too big to fail — at least permanently.

In a sane universe, Donald Trump would have been left penniless in the 1990s and today would be a used car salesman living in a trailer. See also Following Trump’s money exposes the awful truth: Our president is a ‘financial vampire’.

Seems to me these practices are not just bad for their companies; they are bad for the overall economy. At the very least we need much more regulation of executive compensation. No CEO is worth the money they arrange to pay themselves.

Trump Is Boring

Yesterday the New York Times reported that Trump can’t be dissuaded from using cell phones that Chinese and Russians can listen to. Trump dismissed the story as “boring.” For once, I agree with him. How many more “Trump Is a Moron” stories do we have to be subjected to?

Martin Longman agrees.

Despite promising myself that I’d never accept Donald Trump’s behavior or politics as normal, I have to admit that he’s worn me down. Some of his bad behavior is so familiar now that I can’t muster the interest to comment on it. I’m frankly bored by the news that the Chinese and Russians listen in on his phone calls because he doesn’t heed the experts who advise him how to keep his conversations secure. I know this is doubly or triply outrageous because he made such a big deal out of Hillary Clinton’s lapses in information security during her time as Secretary of State (“But, her emails!”). But the whole hypocrisy angle is so played out, and seems to make so little difference, that I can’t muster the energy to pursue it.

Of course I am alarmed and disturbed that our president is completely reckless and allows our adversaries to listen to his most private conversations.  But I concluded so long ago that he needs to be removed from office that this is like adding a grain of sand onto a sand dune of evidence.

This was the one paragraph of the New York Times story that was mildly interesting.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

In other words, he won’t spill secrets because he’s too stupid to understand them. But we’ve known that for a long time. B-o-r-i-n-g.

In other news, it appears Megyn Kelley is about to leave NBC, from which she will be missed about as much as Matt Lauer.  It says here nobody likes her. But she’ll likely get a $69 million severence. I want her job.

A Sham of Biblical Proportions

I really don’t want to talk about politics. It all sucks. So instead let’s have fun laughing at the noobs who poured so much money into the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC.

The Museum of the Bible announced Monday that at least five of its Dead Sea Scrolls — among the most valuable and historically significant items in its collection — are fakes. …

…The five scrolls represent a major proportion of the museum’s 16-piece collection of Dead Sea Scrolls, acquired as part of the 40,000-piece Green family collection over the past decade. Doubts about their authenticity were first raised two years ago by scholars in the academic journal Brill. Since then, scholar Kipp Davis of Trinity Western University has argued that at least seven of the scrolls were fake, based on the language used in the fragments and other textual evidence.

The announcement of the forgery comes after years of controversy and criticism over the museum’s approach to scholarship, which is heavily rooted in its evangelical Christian ethos. The 430,000-square-foot, $500 million museum, which opened in November 2017, is the brainchild of the Green family, the evangelical Christian owners and founders of the craft store chain Hobby Lobby. Last year, the museum sent five of the disputed fragments to a German laboratory for testing. The results, which were publicly released this week, cast serious doubt on the authenticity of all five.

Inside the Museum of the Bible, which apparently is a 430,000-square-foot cheese fest.

The controversy over the Dead Sea Scrolls is about more than just the Green family’s academic rigor, or lack thereof. It’s also about the very particular way that many evangelical Christians see the Bible — a perspective that has made the evangelical market particularly susceptible to forgeries.

Basically, evangelicals try to argue that the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the current Bible has been unchanged through the centuries, while scholars say the Dead Sea Scrolls prove just the opposite.

Charles Pierce:

This fills me with a flood tide of entirely un-Christian glee. The Green family, the sex-obsessed theocrats behind Hobby Lobby, have done quite enough damage to the country to have earned being played for suckers like this. And, as is customary for all modern Christian evangelicals in politics, the Greens ignored the warnings of experts in Biblical archaeology who told them they likely were buying fakes. …

… Blessed are the theocrats, for they shall be called marks and rubes.

The Greens had broken laws importing the stuff they bought on the antiquities black market, so I can’t feel too sorry for them. I wonder if the thing is making them a return on their investment. Maybe it will be as big a money loser as Ark Encounter.

Tax Cuts Bad, Obamacare Good

Trump Republicans have two issues: Tax cuts and scary dark foreign people.

Last year, when Republicans shoved through their so-called “tax cuts and jobs” act, they were certain they had just bought a midterm win. But by this past summer they were abandoning tax cuts as a campaign ad talking point, mostly because it wasn’t working.  Voters weren’t falling for the scam.

So it was a big surprise to many people last week when Trump promised more tax cuts.

President Donald Trump has promised a new middle-income tax cut plan to land days before the midterm election, a move aimed at boosting his party’s chances of holding its Congressional majorities — yet Republican tax policy-makers know nothing about it.

Party leaders were caught off-guard by Trump’s comments, made Saturday after a rally in Nevada, that “we’re looking at a major tax cut for middle income people,” and that House Republicans, including Speaker Paul Ryan, are working on a possible bill.

In fact, the House did pass a “tax cuts 2.0” bill in September, but the Senate sat on it. That might have been what Trump was thinking of; things do tend to get scrambled around in his addled head. See also “Republicans were supposed to run on their tax cuts. Instead, they’re running away from them.” Seems kind of stupid to keep talking about them at all, actually, but what else can Republicans do?

Oh, wait … they can embrace Obamacare. Paul Waldman wrote today,

First, polls over the past year or so have shown the law to be consistently popular — more so than, for instance, the tax cut Republicans thought would be the key to a midterm election victory. When even Fox News polls show the law getting more support than ever, the world is obviously not as Republicans would like it to be.

Second, instead of demanding that the ACA be torn from its foundations and set ablaze, the public seems more inclined to entrench its protections and expand its coverage. As the Associated Press reports, in the four conservative states where voters got initiatives on the ballot to accept the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid and insure thousands more people, the conservative lawmakers who refused to do so for years have been shocked by the popularity of the measures, with polls showing them with a good likelihood of winning.

Here in Missouri, incompetent weasel Josh Hawley, running against Claire McCaskill, has television ads running nonstop in which he declares that he does too support making insurance companies cover people with preexisting conditions, in spite of the fact that as Missouri Attorney General he joined a lawsuit seeking to overturn the ACA. And, of course, he has no coherent plan for replacing it. But he just luvs those preexisiting conditions requirements.

Waldman:

Then, of course, there’s the fact that the ACA’s guarantee of coverage for people with preexisting conditions has suddenly become the hottest issue in the midterm elections, so much so that one Republican candidate after another is airing ads proclaiming his fervent commitment to maintaining those protections — the very protections Republicans have been trying to destroy with repeal efforts and lawsuits aimed at getting the law struck down. You can find few better signs of the political success of a law than when the people who fought against it and are still trying to destroy it rush to assure voters that in fact they dearly love what it does.

And every time another Republican airs an ad claiming that he wants to mandate protections for preexisting conditions, he only reinforces one of the ideas that drove the creation of the ACA in the first place: that it’s the responsibility of government to ensure that every American has secure health coverage.

This leaves the Republicans with one signature issue that might work for them, which is scary dark foreign people. My sense of the polling is that Republican voters are scared out of their lily-white wits.

OMAHA — The guests at the Republican Business and Professional Women’s candidate forum were halfway through dessert when Representative Don Bacon offered to take their questions.

“There’s a thousand immigrants coming to our border again. From Honduras,” one woman called out. “And we’re unable to stop them without giving them asylum.”

Then a second woman asked about immigration. And a third. And a fourth. And a fifth.

Mr. Bacon, a centrist Republican seeking re-election in the only district in Nebraska that voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and sent a Democrat to Congress as recently as 2014, struggled to move the conversation along, alluding to “a breakdown in the rule of law” and his support for immigration measures that Democrats had blocked.

But soon the banquet room, filled with a few dozen people who appeared mostly white and in their 60s and 70s, broke into chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!”

Yeah, all those migrants from Honduras are going straight to Omaha. And they’re going to break into your houses and get into your refrigerators and eat the fancy jello mold you made for the church supper and leave you with nothing.

Jeebus, people, get a grip.

Actual photo I found on the internet of actual Republican voters in Alabama earlier this year.

The question is, how is this issue working for people who weren’t going to vote Republican, anyway? Polling tells us that independents and Democrats are not all that panicked about the scary dark foreign people. However, it might get the frightened addled old white folks out to vote.

I’m not going to let Dems off the hook. See Charles Blow:

One thing that I find profoundly disappointing about modern liberalism, particularly as it now stands in opposition to Trumpism, is the degree to which it is reactive, governed by what is being done to it rather than its own positive vision.

It is true that Donald Trump is not only antithetical to liberal values, he is antithetical to most American values, and as such limiting his power and limiting the duration of his tenure are of paramount concern and absolute urgency.

Therefore, resisting what Trump represents becomes a central point of moral rectitude and ultimate patriotism. Resistance is a reaction to Trump.

But that can’t be the sum total of one’s statement of principles. You must be driven toward a concept of what you want this country to become, and not just driven by a fear of what the country could descend into.

This has been my gripe about the Democratic Party for many years.  It’s why Dems can’t turn out the base. It’s why even those of us who see how much damage the Right is doing feel jaded and manipulated when told to “vote blue no matter who.” Ultimately, it’s why Hillary Clinton lost, although her lips will fall off before she’ll admit it. At least before 2020, get a vision, please.

Mobs and Mobsters

Following up the “Many Standards of Anger” post — one of the Creature’s new tag lines is “Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs.” As for the latter charge, let’s review —

See “Republican presidents flunk the economy: 11 reasons why America does worse under the GOP.” Of course, y’all know this stuff.

As for the second

The Miami-Dade Republican Party’s County Chairman led an angry mob of partisans, alongside the local leader of national hate group the Proud Boys, in an attack on a Democratic campaign office this week.

Miami GOP Chairman Nelson Diaz planned the event (image below) and local Congressman Carlos Curbelo publicized the protest heavily, before and after.

No big surprise there, either. See also,

A group of hecklers angrily confronted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during a campaign stop for a congressional hopeful in South Florida, cursing at her and calling her a communist in a moment that was captured on video.

It was yet another incident that stoked fears that the country’s bitter and emotional political environment is at risk of leading to violence.

Pelosi has her flaws, but if she’s a communist I’m Brad Pitt. Anyway, these two reports may be of the same incident, although it’s not clear.

We’re hearing more news stories about people like Mitch McConnell being harassed in restaurants.  I’m having a hard time working up much sympathy for McConnell. Anyone who has done as much damage to the United States as McConnell has should not be able to show his face in public without consequences. But I also suspect that if people are becoming more aggressive it’s because they feel powerless. The political system is utterly corrupted; nothing works as it should. Time for the torches and pitchforks.

And it’s especially rich that the Creature, who literally patterns himself after mob bosses, should complain about mobs.